Damn, 2021 did not come to play.
I was going to spend today’s newsletter extolling the virtues of Dry January and being “social media sober,” but the MAGA gurls storming DC and temporarily turning it into their own Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone snapped my resolve to stay logged off.
So I spent all day yesterday glued to my screens, watching at least ten Twitch livestreams while deliriously thumbing through Twitter texting friends and lurking the discourse on Discord. Cataclysmic news events unfold like data tsunamis, with the real action happening in a memer-commentariat metaverse far far away from the Boomer traditional news chatter.
A couple hours into my marathon news binge—as my brain was besieged by images of pasty white dudes in animal horns and fur cloaks roaming the halls of the Capitol Building—it became evident that this idiotic mob’s antics were not made for TV, but for TikTok. All these Trumpers swagged out in headdresses like Buffalo Bill cosplay, all these anarcho-primitivist ass, caveman LARP looks? This is what thirst trapping for social media virality (and virility) looks like in the age of QAnon-—where these costumed cavemen plunder physical reality as endless material for photo-ops to be deployed in the real battleground of memetic warfare.
In fact, I am going to posit that what happened yesterday was not a coup but a carnival, in both the Burning Man and Bakhtin sense of the word. I’ve been writing a lot about the purpose of partying in political resistance—most recently in this sprawling essay I wrote for Document Journal—and the libidinous chaos scaling the walls of Capitol Hill yesterday had some serious Meth ParTy Energy. This is dark euphoria.